Generally, radioactive materials such as a radioactive isotope, used in a sample such as blood collected from a human body or directly injected into a human body for a purpose of diagnosis, treatment, or medical research, and a labeled compound thereof are referred to as radiopharmaceuticals.
A theory of medical use of radioactive materials is first introduced by G. Hevesy in 1913. Radiopharmaceuticals have two characteristics as a medicine and a radioactive material. Of those, as the medicine, firstly, the radiopharmaceutical should be a material appropriate for a purpose of inspection or treatment, secondly, should be nontoxic and should not cause any problem in the future, and lastly, should be currently clinically supplied.
As the characteristic of a radioactive material, firstly, the radiopharmaceutical should be easily operated due to a moderate physical half-life and have less problem due to a short effective half-life, secondly, should be excellent in efficiency and shielding of a measure machine due to moderate energy emitted from the radioactive material, thirdly, has high specific radioactivity, and lastly should be easily purchased and economical.
However, since radiopharmaceuticals generally decay differently from a general medicine, there is a time limit from manufacturing to use.
Currently, the radiopharmaceuticals are used in about 80 types of medical diagnoses and researches. About 30 types of radiopharmaceuticals are produced in Korea, and the radiopharmaceuticals are classified into treatment, diagnosis, inside body use, and outside body use according to a purpose of use.
A diagnostic drug for inside body use is used for a morphological diagnosis or measurement of a function of a specific organ and an internal organ by radioactive diagnostic medicine injected into an inside of human body using a characteristic as a chaser of radioactive isotope and for measurement of an amount of specific material in a human body, such as blood, or a flow expansion time, and is used for an eating rate, a dissipation rate, a metabolic rate and the like in each organ.
Since a diagnostic drug for outer body use is used to perform quantitative inspection of extremely few physiological active substances existing in blood or urine, a carrier thereof, or an injected medicine, there is no need to consider radioactivity exposure to a patient. Also, since the amount of used radioactive isotope is extremely few, the diagnostic drug for outer body use is conveniently handled. The measuring method includes a competitive reaction, a competitive protein binding assay (CPBA), a radioimmunoassay (RIA), a radioreceptor assay (RRA) and the like, and the diagnostic drug for outer body use is provided as a radiopharmaceutical kit.
In the object such as the radioactive isotope or radiopharmaceuticals, the amount of radioactivity of the object stored in a storage container is first measured whenever necessary, and the amount of the object in which a unit dose of radioactivity is included is calculated, and thus the calculated amount of the object is moved to a medicine bottle or an injector to be used.
The technique of distributing such an object is disclosed in Korean Patent No. 10-0740215 in detail.
However, a conventional apparatus or method of distributing an object has problems of an inconvenience in that an amount of radioactivity included in the object should be measured, accuracy in distributing a set amount of the object at a set concentration is decreased, and a safety accident in which a user is excessively exposed to the radioactivity frequently occurs.